Where I Work

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

In this podcast, Jessie Shternshus , Paul Hammond and I take a shot at addressing the question of whether organizations have become so focused by the need to “do” Agile that they may have lost the ability to actually “be” Agile. During the conversation we touch on a number of the key challenges organizations are facing and how these challenges are impacting individuals at the team level.

Show Notes

00:45 Introduction to Jessie and Paul

02:00 The Topic(s): Do we need to return to a more simple version of it so that people can better understand/internalize the fundamental intent behind it and not simply get lost in dogma and going thru the motions? How do we help “them” figure out the “why”?

06:30 Does leadership need to deeply understand Agile to help support transition to Agile or can the organization succeed if they just want to “do Agile”?

08:48 Changing the conversation to help people approach Agile with a more open mindset?

10:48 Mapping organizational values to Agile Manifesto values

11:30 How to create hope (that things can improve) at an organization?

14:20 Taking the option to “Make a choice”

16:37 Advice for getting “Buy In”

18:03 How do we unfreeze the frozen middle?

20:08 Should leadership demonstrate vulnerability when trying to transition to Agile? (crickets)

20:46 How do I help my company become a place innovative, agile people will want to work?

22:47 You can’t put a band-aid on culture

23:56 What id you hire for the culture you want, and disappoint the new folks with what you have?

26:15 Has anyone’s Agile transformation ever gone fast enough? What is the pace of transition that you need?

Thursday, November 10, 2016

In this special video podcast, FocusedObjective’s Troy Magennis provides a walk through of two important tools that can help you in understanding the impact of trying to inject work into your team’s backlog and in forecasting how much work your teams can achieve within a certain time frame.

In the first part of the video, Troy presented the Multiple Feature Cut Line Forecaster. When people in your organization start trying to add work into a team’s workflow, this tool will help you understand the impact of the added work and help you assess the impact of reprioritizing the work to deal with the additional work. If you need a way of showing management how their new requests are going to negatively impact your team’s ability to deliver, or if you just want to help them make smarter choices about what work they are adding to your plate, the walk thru presents a simple explanation of how this tool can be used to help your organization make smarter choices.

In the second part of the video (12:30), Troy presents the Multiple Team Forecaster. This tool will allow you to use historical data from multiple teams in your organization to understand their throughput, even though they are sizing and estimating work in completely different ways. This is especially valuable if you are working in an organization where you have multiple teams and you are considering standardizing their estimation process so that you can get a better sense of how they are doing with delivering work across the portfolio. You do not have to standardize on a specific method of estimation - let the teams do what they do. Using this tool you can look at how each team is delivering, based on historical data, to get a better sense of their ability to deliver a certain amount of work within a given time frame.

If you’d like to learn more about the tools Troy has created, you can contact him via his website above, follow him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/t_magennis or you can see him present them in person. He is going to be holding a workshop on Forecasting Using Data in Austin, TX on November 17. You can find information about this event here: http://forecastingusingdata.eventbrite.com